The Beginning After The End Chapter 526 - 520 : Unflinching

All color drained from the pocket dimension. Pale light wrapped around Kezess in the form of a dragon, while dark flames drew in shadows around Agrona. Kezess himself didn't move, but the dragon's jaws opened wide. Agrona, wreathed in flames, split, repeating images of himself appearing rapidly to the left and right, moving as if to encircle us. White fire flashed, momentarily blinding me as it swallowed the space where Agrona had been.

I didn't blink as I poured aether into King's Gambit, pushing the godrune's capabilities past anything I had trained for. My perception sped up, making time and the movements of the two asuran god-kings slow until I could just barely follow along.

The dragon's head turned one way, following the still-growing circle of shadowy, flickering Agronas, pure mana scouring away the air, the stone, and the shadows all at once. Kezess's own eyes followed the ring in the opposite direction, with each image flashing into a combustion of aether as his eyes touched them.

My Realmheart-enhanced senses were drowned in the outpouring of mana. Agrona and Kezess seemed to be anywhere and everywhere at once. The unrestrained clash of their powers was suffocating.

The stone beneath my feet shifted as the dragon's breath devoured the floor. I pushed away from the little atmospheric aether contained inside the pocket dimension, hovering just as the floor gave way, crumbling into a lower section of the castle.

Aether spilled from me to congeal into a small vertical platform at my feet. Even as I planted my soles against it, aether also built up throughout my body, condensing until there was a sudden explosion through my muscles. I shot backwards, leaving behind a shockwave within the mana and aether, a short blade simultaneously forming in my hand. A second sequence of explosions went through my arm and shoulder, propelling the blade into a backwards thrust with so much force that I felt my bones spiderweb with fractures.

The strike slammed into an immovable counter-force, and my momentum stopped, jarring me and conjuring a marrow-deep ache through my whole body. I looked down at a white-gauntleted hand gripping my wrist. My eyes snapped up to meet Agrona's, and he raised a brow slightly. In front of me, there was a thunderous boom as the air of my supersonic passage slammed back together.

Then Kezess's attack swallowed us.

We vanished in a white fire of pure mana.

A black shadow clawed through the white, and I raised my arms to defend myself. The impact sent me flying backwards out of the flames. By the time I caught myself, aether had collected along my wounds, fusing fractured bone and split flesh.

The flames subsided, and for a moment, I was looking at the hollowed- out core of Taegrin Caelum. The floor, and several below it, had caved into a pile of smoking rubble. While the ceiling was still collapsing, the chambers above us twisting and melting at the edges, as if they weren't entirely rendered in this extradimensional space.

Kezess still hadn't moved except to float a few feet into the air. His fine clothes remained unruffled, not even a hair out of place. His eyes, like two bright flashes of violet lightning, swept the rubble, but Agrona was nowhere to be seen.

His white-hot gaze came to rest on me, and the smallest frown pinched his lips.

I felt the mental intrusion an instant later.

'Gah!' Regis exclaimed in surprise. 'Shit!' Then my companion was forcefully ejected from my body, at first pooling on the broken stonework before taking his physical form, hackles up, a low growl deep in his throat as he looked threateningly back at me.

My throat closed, and I suddenly couldn't swallow. "Regardless of your desire to help me, you will do so." The words came from me, but the voice wasn't mine, or at least, not mine alone. Two rich baritones echoed over and across each other, one mine, the other Agrona's.

My hands clenched into fists, trembling. My neck craned uncomfortably, and I stared at Kezess, whose expression had flattened into a complete lack of emotion. "Go on, Kezess. He's trapped us both in here. Pull out his insides, melt the flesh from his weak bones. Free yourself."

Kezess didn't move, didn't speak. His eyes burrowed into mine as if he could see straight through to the struggle between my control and Agrona's.

A sword of aether condensed into my fist. The sword was jagged and dark, dripping corruption like drops of black blood.

Regis shot forward, and I twisted, thrusting the blade at his throat. He became shadow and aether, then flame, and the violet blaze ran down the length of the sword. All of my King's Gambit-enhanced concentration slammed inward at once, scouring my physical form for every shred of essence that was not me, and like a flood through a canal, I pushed that essence along, forcing it into a single place.

The Destruction blade swept up at the joint of my left shoulder even as the aetheric armor folded out, exposing my skin. The blade's passage through skin, muscle, and bone was effortless, almost painless. The corrupted flesh tumbled to the ground, burning with Destruction, and the resistance, that punishing force from within-Agrona, fighting for control of my body-vanished.

My armor grew down over the hole in my left side. Dark smoke and fire were rising from the arm that had been attached there only a second before. I pulled back my blade, which straightened and brightened as I reasserted my control, then thrust at the core of where Agrona was reforming.

Destruction danced within the heart of the cloud, reaching for something to consume. The smoke and fire retracted, splitting into two separate clouds, then again into four, then eight. Each cloud carried within it a tiny spark of Destruction, but that was enough to begin consuming them from within. The clouds split again and again as if a hurricane wind was blowing them away, until the spark of Destruction they carried was diffused down to nothing at all.

I swept my blade sideways, God Step opening up a dozen points of connectivity, each one allowing a small piece of the Destruction blade to pass through, each one striking one of Agrona's manifestations. In an instant, a dozen of his cloud forms ignited with the amethyst flames of Destruction, burning away to nothing, but all the others slammed back together, constituting into an uninjured Agrona.

At the same time, the ethereal silver-white dragon around Kezess slammed one claw down into the ground, shaking this other-worldly echo of Taegrin Caelum.

I felt the hardening of time around me, like the dragon's claw was pinning me to the ground. For an instant, I hesitated. I was unwilling to be trapped by Kezess's power, but I didn't want to break the spell entirely and give Agrona some way to escape. Through the interwoven branches of my widely spread thoughts, held within the matrix formed by King's Gambit, I lightly touched on the truth of this conflict. Self- preservation won out.

Pushing back against Kezess's aetheric art as I had done before, I shed his aetheric time stop.

Agrona hitched, suddenly still. There was a ripping within the fabric of time, then he was moving-had moved-and then was still again. Agrona was fighting back against the spell, too. But it wasn't only time that was hardening; air and space were condensing into something heavy and tangible. The atmosphere crystallized around him, a slightly pearlescent shell of clear diamond encasing his stuttering form like a sarcophagus. His eyes snapped back into normal motion just as the sarcophagus completely surrounded him.

Seeing him trapped, I went to one knee. My right hand pressed against the clean cut where I'd taken my left arm. It would heal, but it would take time.

As Kezess finally deigned to move, stepping lightly across ground that reformed beneath his feet toward the entrapped Agrona, I channeled and shaped aether out of my core. The sealed armor over my left shoulder opened again, and aether pooled from it, not forming fresh flesh but elongating outward into a purple, lightly glowing facsimile of an arm. I stood and flexed the appendage, working the fingers and rotating the joints. In my head, I could feel it as if it were my own.

It would do until the real thing could grow back.

I stood, carefully watching Agrona and Kezess. The basilisk stared at the dragon from within the crystalline prison. The dragon glowered back.

"For my daughter," Kezess said, his voice quiet but hard as steel. He raised his hand and closed it into a fist.

The crystalline sarcophagus crushed inward like a tin can. The clear, pearlescent rock went crimson in an instant, Agrona's body demolished, his blood and viscera entrapped within.

At the same time, Kezess grunted in pain as a black spike jammed into his ribs, punching through his mana and aether.

He spun, his glower settling on the only thing he could see: me. I could see the calculation running behind his eyes as he determined whether or not I'd been the one to attack him.

Clenching my fist around the handle of the Destruction blade, I shook my head and opened my mouth to answer his unspoken question.

Behind him, the crystal shattered, melting like ice. The blood and gore was gone as if it had never been there, and a dark, amused laugh rang out throughout the pocket dimension.

I suddenly recognized the probing tentacles of void wind and sound mana in my head and realized it was an illusion. I sheared the threads from my mind, then felt along their lengths back to the source. Using the principles of mana cancellation, I agitated the mana with my aether, breaking the spell apart.

A purple pulse rippled through the space, collapsing the illusion, but there was no time to see the result. Erupting from the nova of my pulse, a tornado of black spikes the length of my hand filled the pocket dimension. I ducked my face behind the crook of my aetheric arm, which expanded out like a shield around me, cracking and reforming a hundred times a second as I was pummeled from every direction.

Kezess's mana signature flared, and white light spread across the pocket dimension like paint from a brush. The air stilled. When the light dimmed, the fortress seemed unharmed, all the damage of our battle suddenly undone. The smell of fresh rain and fertile soil lingered, somehow calming. The whirling spikes had faded, and Agrona was standing where he'd been before the fight began.

I honed in all my senses-King's Gambit and Realmheart, my core's sense of aether, and my own eyes, ears, and intuition-on Agrona. It was him; his illusion had been broken.

Agrona was slightly pale and sweating. Opposite him, Kezess was bleeding from the wound in his side. A faint aetheric spell clung to him, suppressing the effects of whatever weakening corruption seeped through his veins.

There was a lull. Agrona, ever unable to stop himself from talking, spoke into the quiet. "Kezess. Kezzy. I've spent centuries preparing for this moment. You don't think I planned on extinguishing the entire dragon race without learning to protect myself against your greatest weapon, do you? Especially after the revelation of Arthur's abilities..." His placid expression darkened, and his focus shifted to me. "As for you, Arthur. You're holding back. Retaining your strength. How long do you think you can keep this up for? It was unwise of you to come in with us. The smart thing would have been to send me in and close the door behind me, leaving us both to fight it out."

Agrona's expression shifted into a wily grin. "You just can't let go, though, can you? Of that hero complex. Had to be here yourself, make sure I was really finished. Do it yourself, if you can." His brows rose. "Well? Can you?"

I answered with a concentrated aether blast from the palm of my transparent, purple hand. There was a low whoosh, then a roar as the cone of violet energy exploded toward him. He flashed back out of its range, then reversed course, flying directly for me, a black blade appearing in his hand.

Behind me, Kezess was concentrating on a building attack. The white- hot pressure of it was so great that I almost missed the small pin-pricks of mana condensing beneath me from my own shadow. Instead of preparing to fend off Agrona's strike, I God Stepped back twenty feet, leaving behind a row of scales from my armor where several needle-thin spikes had thrust up at me. I stepped again, and again, spikes manifesting everywhere I tried to be, gnawing like teeth.

If not for King's Gambit, I never would have avoided them all. Agrona's attacks came too fast for sight or mana-sense alone to detect. My thoughts, my attention, were spread out around me, King's Gambit allowing me to focus on a hundred specific points of minutiae at once.

The silver-white dragon had stepped forward, its wings wrapped around Kezess to ward off any of the spikes that targeted him. He was still standing in the same spot, but his eyes were closed. As I flashed across the space again and again, pushed hard by Agrona's spikes growing from the ground, my own shadow, the very air, Kezess seemed blissfully ignorant.

But no, that wasn't quite right. Pulses of time, speeding up and slowing down rapidly, pushing and pulling at me and Agrona, saved me more than once.

And still, I wasn't quite fast enough.

I had barely appeared, aetheric lightning racing down the exterior of my armor, when a spike pierced the bottom of my foot and punched out the top of my knee. The wound went from agonizing to numb in an instant, my vision swam, and my hold over my godrunes started to slip. Sharp pain blossomed from my hip, chest, and neck. I looked down to find myself run through in several places by thin spikes oozing black ichor.

'Destruction!' Regis bellowed inside of me. 'Burn it out-'

My fuzzy brain's focus drifted to a beam of hot white light that shot up from the center of the wide chamber. Kezess had finished channeling his spell and now reached up toward the ceiling, the beam issuing from his hand. The stonework above and below him was collapsing in a ripple that ran outward. His eyes snapped open, locked on Agrona, and narrowed. His hand came down.

The beam split the fortress in half, like a sword that stretched from the roots of the world into the sky above and blazed with the light and heat of the sun. Even through my catatonia, I felt it scorching my skin. My eyes watered, but I couldn't close them; my face had gone numb. The floor gave way beneath me. I started to fall.

There was a moment when I could see the two halves of the fortress looming over me, divided evenly and slowly separating from one another. Sunlight filtered in from far above through the murky grayness of the pocket dimension's outer barrier. Then the two halves of the castle crashed together like giant stone hands, and the light cut out.

My body spun in the air, and I saw down through hundreds of floors, divided as if the fault lines had shifted and the earth had broken open, leaving behind a dark void. I was falling into that emptiness, no longer able to control my body or my magic.

Shadows wrapped around me, and my descent slowed. It was dark except for a flickering purple light. The light grew stronger, and I was aware of flames spreading across me. Between one halting breath and the next, the numbness was burned away and replaced with pain.

I screamed.

Destruction. Violet fire was in my blood. I was being consumed from the inside out.

The pain receded, and I sucked in a gasping, choked breath as aether rushed to heal my ruined circulatory system. My vision was distorted, my thoughts sluggish and confused.

"Easy, princess, take it easy," a familiar voice was muttering from above me.

I bobbed up and down in the darkness as my senses returned.

Crashing and explosions came from above, and more rubble tumbled past us.

I felt Regis's mind probe mine, trying to determine if I was going to be okay. In the absence of King's Gambit, which had fallen away like most of my other channeled godrunes, it was easier for him to be in my head.

I immediately flailed mentally, grabbing hold of thoughts I couldn't be thinking and pushing them down into darkness.

"Whoa, easy there, princess, it's just me," he said warily, pulling back slightly. It was an awkward motion, considering he was holding me up.

I cleared my throat, wiped blood from my eyes, and took over my own flight, pulling out of his grip. He had taken on his Destruction form, and his thick wings were beating swiftly to keep him hovering. Dark rock surrounded us on all four sides and above us. The void extended below. Every couple of seconds, the walls and ceiling shook.

"I had to burn Agrona's poison out of you," Regis explained as my brain healed and my thoughts rushed to catch up. "The ceiling grew back in over us."

Pushing aether into Realmheart, I searched for Kezess and Agrona, expecting to feel their battle high above.

Instead, I felt nothing. Even without King's Gambit active, I could guess that Agrona had pushed us off into a corner of the pocket dimension and folded it in around us.

I could also guess it was some kind of trap. Slowly, testing my capabilities after having Destruction moving through my veins-those for blood and mana both-I sent fresh aether down into King's Gambit as well. My mind ignited with thought and possibility as the crown glowed from my brow. "He wants me to punch a hole back into the rest of the isolated space. The pocket dimension will rip, and he'll use that to escape and try to trap Kezzess and me back inside."

"Would that work?" Regis asked, Destruction flickering between his teeth.

I could only shrug, causing my body to bob up and down in the void. "If I'd have known for sure I could have trapped them both in here until they rotted, I'd have done it. But this is Agrona's creation. He understands it better than I do."

Besides, I thought to myself, separately from my connection to Regis, if my visions from the last keystone unfold as I had them, I wouldn't be able to hold the pocket dimension closed much longer anyway.

Briefly, I prodded the boundaries of the pocket dimension with my new spatium godrune. Then aether pushed into Aroa's Requiem. A gentle golden light splashed through the angry violet light of Regis's flames, and the godrune's particles flowed along my arm and out into empty space, congregating along the walls and ceiling. It took some time.

The stone seemed to crumble, as if the motes were ten thousand insects eating away at it. The crashing and impact of battle grew louder, the walls quaking more violently. Broken, half-formed floors rippled down the walls, and the ceiling broke open, sealed